In 1967, Joseph Epstein was hired as part of an editorial team tasked with revising and updating the Encyclopedia Britannica. Not long thereafter, Mortimer J. Adler, the son of Jewish immigrants from Germany and the great evangelist of popularizing philosophy, took over the project. Of Adler, Epstein writes, “Mortimer’s intentions were of the highest; his grasp of reality of the lowest.” But Adler was one of many fascinating characters Epstein describes, and certainly not the only Jew:

Clifton (or Kip, as he was known) Fadiman’s story was that he had hoped to go to graduate school in English at Columbia, but was told that the English department there already had accepted Mr. Lionel Trilling, its way of saying that the graduate-student quota for Jews was filled, thank you very much.

Kip Fadiman had a Jewish problem, and not only with the Columbia English department. Born in Brooklyn in 1904, the son of a druggist and a nurse, he expressed his discomfort with his Jewishness through the novel mode of extreme pretension. At a meeting about the reorganization of Britannica, he composed a rubric for the new table of contents that ran: “The beginning of cinema: the curious confluence of an emerging technology and a surgent entrepreneurial ethnic group.” When this was read aloud in one of our many editorial meetings, Robert Hazo passed a note to me that read, “I think he means the Jews got there first.”

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.